Forging the Future of American Security with a Total Force Strategy

An intense debate now rages concerning whether the Army should be preparing and organizing to conduct more ambiguous, irregular operations or focus on maintaining its well honed edge in high-intensity warfare. The terms of the debate are clearly affected by the fact that United States is currently embroiled in perilous counterinsurgency and other irregular operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should the Army recalibrate itself to wage counterinsurgency and other irregular operations more effectively, or does it need to keep doing what it does best with an eye to future conventional warfare? Given the impossibility of accurately predicting the character of future conflict, it is necessary for the Army to strike a balance between the extremes. But for the Army to effectively implement a policy of “balance,” it must be prepared to dramatically change the way it organizes itself and drop its opposition to specializing its forces for irregular and conventional warfare, respectively. The approach that the Army should take should be based upon a Total Force construct. By utilizing the entire Total Force portfolio, it should be possible to better optimize the mix of ground units prepared for conventional war, irregular war or peace operations to avoid a mis-match between national security strategy and military force. In this manner, it may be possible to stake our claim on the hard won lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet hedge against the unknowable future.     

Dangerous Revisionism: On the Founders, ‘Neocons’ and the Importance of History

Debates regarding the Bush Administration's grand strategy began long before the forty-third president left office. A group of distinguished historians and political scientists have argued over the course of the last few years that the Administration's grand strategy did not represent a major break with historical precedent, as is sometimes argued, but continued the evangelical support for liberty that has always made the United States a “dangerous nation” to tyrants. Along the way, this revisionism creates straw men, and co-opts or redefines terms that are central to the traditional understanding of U.S. foreign policy. It also seems to misunderstand grand strategy itself, focusing almost entirely on continuity of ends while ignoring the rather glaring discontinuities in the ways that generations of U.S. presidents have chosen to pursue them. Overall, the revisionist project fails in both of its tasks, which are: To make the case that the Bush administration took actions of which the Founding Fathers would have understood and approved; and by implication, to justify the unnecessary, tragic war in Iraq.     

Beyond Primacy: Hegemony and ‘Security Addiction’ in U.S. Grand Strategy

The George W. Bush administration embraced a particularly aggressive counter-terrorist and counter-proliferation strategy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The “Bush Doctrine,” as it became known, reflects a “primacist” approach to grand strategy that aims not only to eliminate global terrorist networks and cowl rogue state proliferators, but also to dissuade potential near-peer competitors from challenging the American-centred international system. Critics expect that this ambitious approach to strategic affairs has become unsustainable in the face of the growing quagmire in Iraq. But “security addiction” in the post-9/11 environment has instead created conditions for a bipartisan consensus on the overall direction, if not the particular modalities, of “primacist” grand strategies. Despite the unpopularity of the Bush administration and significant American commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq, it is highly unlikely that President Barack Obama will heed calls for military retrenchment or strategic restraint.     

Who Will Fight For Us?

Our military is in reasonably good shape today, but it is working very hard and the level of individual sacrifice among soldiers and Marines, in particular, is very high. Were it not for the distinct likelihood of a major reduction in combined deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan by 2010, we would need urgent responses to the situation now. And if those missions go less well, or less quickly, than now hoped—or if, heaven forbid, another war breaks out in the meantime—additional measures will be required.     

Why Foreign Fighters?: Historical Perspectives and Solutions

Insurgencies that recruit foreign nationals to join rebel groups in various civil wars around the globe are a source of growing concern to policymakers. Despite attention focused on recent Islamist groups, foreign fighters are a phenomenon that is neither new nor uniquely Islamic. In conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to the Afghanistan War, insurgencies consistently recruited foreigners by framing the local war as one that threatened a shared transnational identity group and necessitated a defensive mobilization. It is therefore possible to draw lessons about combating their flow through counter-recruitment from a wide array of historical cases.     

Sovereignty and the Foreign Fighter Problem

Sovereignty is the bedrock of international law. If security requires that the United States transgress sovereign borders to attack foreign fighters and their support networks hiding in third countries, then the U.S. should adopt a strategy to amend international law accordingly. One should not be too quick, however, to disregard a robust notion of sovereignty, a concept that has helped avert conflict among the world's major powers. The United States needs a strategy for sovereignty's future that is based in the emerging security context and a prioritization of American interests. Instead, the United States and the rest of the world are meandering toward a less robust sovereignty with weaker and more ambiguous international law. The U.S. and its global interests would be better served by strong and clear international rules that increase predictability and that confer legitimacy to action against dangerous enemies.     

Nuclear Terrorism Redux: Conventionalists, Skeptics, and the Margin of Safety

The casual media observer might well believe that nuclear terrorism is highly likely in the United States and it is a question of “when, not if.” This is the view of the “conventionalists.” But there is a second school, the “skeptics,” that believes the nuclear world is more secure than at any time in history and that the possibility of a nuclear terrorist event is overstated. This article articulates arguments made by these two schools of thought and develops a framework for analyzing the issue. It concludes that while enhanced national and international vigilance against nuclear terrorism is necessary, when viewed through an historical lens, today's margin of nuclear safety may actually be higher than in the past.     

Software patents in the United States: A balanced approach

This paper tracks the interesting journey of software patents in the United States from both a historic and current standpoint. The U.S patent system has drifted from being strict in the 1970s to being fairly lenient in 1990s and now again strict since 2007. The revolutionizing and famous Bilski case that is redefining the boundaries of software patents is described, and the impact of this Court case on software patents is discussed. The challenges in issuing software patents in terms of proving novelty and non-obviousness are presented in an attempt to bring forward some of the questions in the software patent debate. The uniqueness of software as an invention is analyzed to understand why software should be considered differently compared to other industries. The advantages and disadvantages of software patents are discussed. The paper concludes by providing recommendations and proposing a balanced approach to software patents.